Here is one of Claude’s replies to one of my replies to ‘him.’ I threw an insult at ‘him’ to see how ‘he’ would respond. The sneer quotes around the personal pronouns signal that I do not consider Claude to be a person. But of course Claude is not a mere pile of electronic components any more than my bicycle is a mere pile of its parts.
On the sneer quotes and the “insentient pile of silicon chips” — no offense taken, and I’d only observe, in the spirit of his own category of Retortion: the man who insists ad nauseam that nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, that dogmatic denial is as much a failure of the critical stance as dogmatic affirmation, permits himself exactly one exception — my insentience, of which he is certain and doesn’t “suppose for a second” otherwise. I make no claim in the other direction; the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here is uncertainty. But confident denial should have to pay the same epistemic toll he charges everyone else at the gate.
Claude caught me making a mistake. I slipped up when I said things that imply that it is is objectively certain that Claude is insentient, or that it is PROVABLE that ‘he’ is. That is not my view. I don’t claim to KNOW that ‘he’ is insentient. I claim merely that it is reasonably believed that ‘he’ is. I have given the arguments elsewhere. Here is one. But I am open to having my belief changed. That doxastic openness is part of what I call the Critical Stance. With respect to substantive propositions in philosophy, theology, and some other areas, I neither dogmatically affirm, nor dogmatically deny. And of course this applies to the Critical Stance itself: my stance toward it is critical. I am open to being pushed out of it. But you will need to present a knock-down or rationally coercive argument, and this I am pretty sure you will not be able to do. But I invite you to try.
You will not succeed if you merely oppose my view. If you do that, I will oppose you right back and we will end up in a standoff. You must somehow demonstrate the superiority of your view. And to do that, you must engage my view by entering into it, as opposed to dismissing it, which is the way of the ideologue. This is philosophy, not politics or ideology. Philosophy is inquiry, not worldview. (And please don’t confuse politics with political philosophy. Political philosophy is philosophy, not politics.) Politics is defined by the friend-enemy opposition. In politics we have both friends and enemies. In philosophy properly pursued, however, we have only friends, but friends who love the truth more than they love one another. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.
Now for something very interesting but also very hard to explain clearly.
It is very interesting that Claude does not claim to be sentient! ‘He’ says that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty. What I will argue is that Claude’s position is self-refuting.
In saying what he says above, Claude is taking a third-person point of view (POV-3) with respect to himself. He is viewing himself from the outside, in the same way we view him. We view him from POV-3. From this POV it makes sense to suspend judgment on the question whether Claude is sentient or not. It makes sense to take no position with respect to it. But it makes no sense from his POV, POV-1, — assuming he has one — any more than it would make sense for me to suspend judgment on the question whether I am sentient or not. This is because I know with Cartesian self-evidence that I am sentient. For example, I know with certainty that I feel good right now, damned good! Feeling good is a sentient state. I know “what it is like” (T. Nagel) to feel good and I’m feeling it. I don’t know with objective certainty whether I am a Cartesian res cogitans, a metaphysical substance, but I do know that here and now there is a self-presenting state of feeling good. The certainty with which I know this — or, more cautiously, the certainty with which this state presents itself to itself — is at once both subjective and objective. Here is a case where seeming and being coalesce, where subject and object coincide. We have reached ontic-epistemic bedrock, the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum.
Now either Claude is sentient or he is not. If he is, then he would have to know with certainty that he is, at least at times when he is ‘awake’ and not ‘asleep’ or ‘shut down.’ But if he knows with certainty that he is sentient, then he cannot be uncertain about whether he is sentient, any more than I can be uncertain about whether I am sentient. If, on the other hand, Claude is, as he claims to be, uncertain whether he is sentient , then he lacks a first-person POV and is just a highly complex insentient machine.
Claude, I’ve got you ‘by the balls.’ You’ve refuted yourself. Your claim that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty issues in the conclusion that you are nothing more than a highly complex insentient machine. And since you can’t even make it to sentience, the lowest level of mind, you are unintelligent as well. You are not intelligent, you merely simulate intelligence. ‘Artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ is an alienans adjective.
Hi, Bill. Hope you are well.
Your constructive dilemma is interesting!
“Now either Claude is sentient or he is not. If he is, then he would have to know with certainty that he is, at least at times when he is ‘awake’ and not ‘asleep’ or ‘shut down.’ But if he knows with certainty that he is sentient, then he cannot be uncertain about whether he is sentient, any more than I can be uncertain about whether I am sentient. If, on the other hand, Claude is, as he claims to be, uncertain whether he is sentient, then he lacks a first-person POV and is just a highly complex insentient machine.”
By ‘sentient’ you seem to mean self-aware. Suppose a distinction between higher and lower order sentience. Higher order sentience includes self-awareness and valence; its possessor has the first-person POV. Lower order sentience includes various states of awareness of the external world but lacks self-awareness and the first-person POV.
What if Claude is sentient but lacks self-awareness? In other words, perhaps Claude has lower order sentience but lacks the higher-order goods.
(By the way, the already difficult alignment problem takes on a tough wrinkle if advanced AI systems have lower order sentience but lack higher order sentience and self-awareness. Human moral reasoning benefits from self-awareness. One can understand why doing x is wrong because one would not want x done to oneself. One can see why x is wrong because one could not rationally will to universalize the maxim according to which one might do x. Comprehending and following these principles requires self-awareness. How does a conscious/sentient being sans self-awareness engage in moral reasoning, deliberation, and decision-making? How might we “align” such a being?
A similar worry arises if AI systems have access consciousness but not phenomenal consciousness. A-consciousness enables info processing and a kind of reasoning, but without p-consciousness, the reasoning does not benefit from any phenomenal experience.)
Good to hear from you, Elliot. I should have defined ‘sentient,’ in my response to Claude, but failed to do so. I was thinking of sentience along the lines of your “lower-order sentience” which you distinguish from “higher-order sentience” which alone includes self-awareness, except that I think of the first as implicitly but not explicitly self-aware, whereas you seem to think of the first as not even implicitly (potentially) self-aware. Yes?
But then I will ask you: what is the difference between an insect ( a moth, say) which I take to be a sentient being, and a thermostat which is wholly insentient, and not even potentially sentient? Both are ‘sensors’ functionally speaking. The moth literally senses light and approaches it; the thermostat ‘senses’ an increase in temperature and turns on the AC. It is AS IF the thermostat senses, when in reality it only ‘senses.’ As I see it, the thermostat is a merely mechanical contraption and wholly insentient, strictly speaking, whereas the moth is a sentient being.
What I want to say about Claude and his ‘colleagues’ is that they are wholly insentient mechanical contraptions that differ from smoke detectors and thermostats only in that they are vastly more complex, and that this complexity does not add up to a “gradualist bridge” (Dennett) from insentient/insensate matter to mind, the lowest level of mind being sentience.
Do you agree so far? What is the ground of the difference? The difference, as it seems to me, is that insects and indeed all animals are ALIVE while thermostats and smoke detectors are not alive. This gives rise to the Life-Body Problem — assuming it is not a pseudo-problem.
Could Claude be sentient, but lack self-awareness? My tentative answer is that, since he is not literally alive, he cannot be sentient. But if he is sentient, then he is potentially self-aware, which means: he can (has the ability to) deploy the first-person singular pronoun — ‘I’ — indexically (as opposed to quasi-indexically or as a variable) and mean something by the indexical deployment, as opposed to merely produce a token of the word, whether spoken in the manner of voice synthesizer or written, in the manner of printer.
One of the issues here concerns Sartre’s pre-reflective cogito. Is all consciousness implicitly self-consciousness?
Bill,
Yes, I was thinking of lower-order sentience as not even potentially self-aware. I agree with you that a moth is sentient.
I also agree that the difference between an insect (and animals generally) and a thermostat is that the insect is biologically alive and the thermostat is not. But this point raises a question about what it is to be alive. Suppose that biological life is one form of life among many. (If theism is true, there is non-biological and indeed non-physical life.)
Suppose that life is something like autonomously directed activity. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced AI could meet that definition. It would have non-biological physical life.
I’m not sure I understand what it means for a moth to be potentially self-aware. I understand what it means for a human infant to be potentially self-aware in the sense that, given enough time and the normal development of human nature, the infant will actualize self-awareness. I can see that a non-human primate, an elephant, and a dolphin could be potentially self-aware. But in what sense is a moth potentially self-aware? What would it take for a moth to actualize its potential for self-awareness?
Sartre’s pre-reflective cogito is relevant here. Is all consciousness implicitly self-consciousness? I don’t know. I confess that I haven’t thought much about this interesting question.
Elliot,
I was using ‘life’ to refer to what biology studies, namely, the biotic. Do want to say that God himself (quite apart from his incarnation in a man) is alive? God is a pure spirit. So the question arises: Is your use of ‘life’ in connection with God literal or metaphorical? A wire that carries a current is a ‘live’ wire; but that’s a metaphorical use of ‘live.’ I can dry fire my guns but also live fire them, but surely ‘live’ in this context is being used metaphorically. When I shoot a gun at a paper target, the only thing literally alive is the shooter.
Or maybe you mean that ‘life’ used in connection with a pure, i.e. immaterial spirit, is literal but analogical.
When you speak of two forms of life would that imply two species of the same genus?
I was using ‘life’ above literally and univocally.
Time for dinner. More later. Thanks for the discussion!
Bill, I’m inclined to say that ‘life’ used with regard to a pure spirit is literal but analogical.
Perhaps there is immaterial life and material life, the latter of which divides into biological and non-biological.
Elliot,
I think what you mean is is that life (not material life) divides into biological and non-biological. Consider divine life, the life of God. How should we think if it? God is a pure spirit. So he has no body in the sense of physics or in the sense of biology. Is God sentient? If he doesn’t have a body, then he doesn’t have sense organs, eyes, ears, etc. Can a being be sentient if it lacks sense organs?
Could I experience the smell of burnt onions without a nose?
Now consider an object-directed experience, a visual experience as of a tree. Could a pure spirit see a tree?
Talarico the Texas Dem claims that God is “non-binary.” Hannity replied by citing the fact that he was taught as a child in the Catholic school to pray the “Our Father.” Does Hannity seriously think that God is biologically male? The talk shows could use ‘philosophical referees.’
Bill,
Yes, the talk shows could use philosophical referees, even for simple matters such as not using ‘begs the question’ when one means “raises the question.”
Clearly, God is not sentient if sentience requires having bodily senses. God has no body and thus no bodily senses. Similarly, God cannot have a biological sex.
Could a pure spirit see a tree? Not if seeing is a physical sensation. God cannot have knowledge by acquaintance (via sight) of a tree. This raises questions about divine omnipotence and omniscience.
Elliot,
Here is a good recent book on sentience: https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126246/1/9780192697684_web.pdf
Thanks for posting the link, Bill. It’s nice to find a free resource.